Cold Summer

Def Jam;
2007

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Young Jeezy isn't much of a rapper, at least as far as that term is traditionally understood. Instead, his appeal rests on three pillars: his overdriven Tony Robbins motivational-speaker rhetoric, his usually-multitracked slow-motion groan, and the churning, monolithic doom-rap production style pioneered by frequent collaborator Shawty Redd. Those three selling-points don't look like much on paper, but they were enough to make for two compulsively listenable albums. Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 and The Inspiration both shifted more than a million copies in a period when albums aren't selling well at all, and they did it on the strength of the triumphantly larger-than-life persona that Jeezy's created for himself. When those three pillars come together right, Jeezy sounds enormous. Without them, he'd be nothing, and that's why you never hear him on tracks that don't match his singular aesthetic. But Cold Summer, the new album from Jeezy's group USDA, mostly does away with the sweeping production and the success-above-all exhortations. When Jeezy is alongside compatriots Slick Pulla and Bloodraw, he loses his emotional strive, instead bullshitting about the day-to-day minutia of drug-dealing. And the production mostly comes from relatively anonymous and untested unknowns, all doing their best to approximate Shawty Redd's titanic lurch and only occasionally succeeding. As for Jeezy's voice, it takes up a whole lot less space, leaving room for his less distinctive friends. And still Def Jam released Cold Summer, and it debuted in Billboard's top five, selling nearly 100,000 copies in its first week. Young Jeezy is good at what he does.

Cold Summer is just the latest in a near-endless string of entourage albums. Whenever a rapper finds success these days, it seems inevitable that he'll eventually scoop up a bunch of hometown buddies and throw them all on an album. Every once in a while, these albums will exploit the hell out of a couple of powerful new voices and build on the established star's appeal; Tha Dogg Pound's Dogg Food immediately springs to mind. More often, though, these albums come off as quickie cash-grabs, diluting their stars' talents and letting a bunch of lesser talents waste everybody's time; consider, if you will, the St. Lunatics' Free City. Cold Summer mostly fits into the latter category; Slick Pulla and Bloodraw lack Jeezy's worldbeating charisma, and Jeezy more often than not descends to their level over the course of the album. Legend has it that Slick Pulla is the guy who first convinced Jeezy to rap, but his husky, punchline-heavy style never makes much of an impression. Pulla had a scene-stealing verse on the original version of Jeezy's "Trap or Die": "Don't talk to square niggas, you know, Spongebobs/ Kanye West niggas, talkin' through the wire, dog." On Cold Summer, though, his most quotable line is this: "The shields in this bitch; we seek and destroy/ Your boy got a mind like Sigmund Freud." That's just not going to cut it. As for Bloodraw, his singsong wheeze blurs into the background more often than not. Bloodraw and Pulla aren't terrible or anything, but they both share space with a genuine star, and both sound workmanlike and indistinct in comparison. As for Jeezy, his sense of purpose only rarely surfaces; for the most part, he's content to kick banalities alongside his friends.

The album has a few bright spots. The regal horns of opener "Focus" animate the song's trap-rap cliches. "Check" boasts disorienting waves of swarming synths and a Bloodraw chorus that actually works. "Live My Life", with its shimmering acoustic guitars and its warm, slow glide of a chorus from Outkast-affiliated crooner Scar, is genuinely pretty. But most of the tracks here sound chintzy and samey, their bargain-basement beats melting into a tedious lump and bottoming out with a remarkably unseductive troika of sex-songs at the middle of the album. We've been hearing a lot of these entourage albums lately, but most of them have been coming out on Koch, an indie-label apparently willing to release music from the crews of B-list rappers like Slim Thug and B.G. I can't for the life of me figure out why Def Jam, still the most important rap label in existence, would take a flier on the two jokers who stand next to Jeezy onstage, and maybe it's telling that the resulting record sounds for all the world like a Koch product. The single best moment on Cold Summer comes at the end of the album: the remix of The Inspiration single "Go Getta", which features strong and memorable guest appearances from Bun B and Jadakiss. Slick Pulla and Bloodraw, appropriately enough, are nowhere to be found.